Smart City Wien: A Sustainable Future Starts Now

Abstract

Vienna is among the most successful cities worldwide where quality of life, infrastructure, and innovation are concerned. Numerous studies and rankings place Vienna in top positions in terms of competitiveness, with the promise of further dynamic development. However, the City of Vienna is facing challenging times: the population in the federal capital is growing and will reach the two million mark over the course of the next decade. This development goes hand in hand with a rising demand for energy, demand for affordable and functional housing, and a need for strong mobility concepts. At the same time, climate change and a severe shortage of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, represent the big global challenges of the coming decades.

This is where Vienna’s Smart City strategy comes into play. Smart City Wien is a long-term initiative by the City of Vienna to improve the design, development, and perception of the federal capital. The initiative looks at a cross-section of the city, covering all areas of life and includes everything from infrastructure, energy, and mobility to all aspects of urban development. It has set itself the task of modernizing the city in order to reduce energy consumption and emissions significantly without having to forego any aspects of consumption or mobility. To achieve this, the city government has adopted a framework strategy to attain its key objective for 2050: High quality of life for everyone in Vienna through social and technical innovation in all areas, while maximizing conservation of resources.

This chapter first gives an overview of the history of framework strategies with an emphasis, among other things, on monitoring, which is essential to highlight successful areas as well as those which require more work. The second chapter describes the thematic fields of the Smart City Wien Framework Strategy 2019–2050. The last chapter deals with various projects that have already been implemented or are in the process of being implemented and provides practical examples.